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Romain Frodure and Tina Tristram
@visionbrute
Travel photographers based in France
Tina: When I was given my first reflex camera at the age of 15, I was fascinated by food photography first. I took everything I could find out of the fridge, trying to make nice compositions. After a while I turned to portrait photography, which seemed much more interesting to me than nature; I loved the power that a look in the eyes or the pose of someone could transmit. It was obvious to me that I wanted to study something artistic after high school, and there I got to know Romain, at the same art school in the section of publicity. Romain: As for me, I was introduced to photography at the art school but it didn’t interest me at all, opposed to now. It was on our trip to Iceland much later, that I really found the joy of telling a story through photography;
"The beauty of the Icelandic landscapes and magic experience that we were living, inspired me."
"For both of us, travel made up a huge part of our childhood."
Our parents loved to travel; when we were small, one went on holidays with the caravan while the other went with the camper van. We think that this vision of traveling has passed on to us and which is why we love so much the adventurous side of traveling without giving priority to comfort. It’s not surprising that the idea of traveling the world was present in our thoughts for both of us individually, but having found each other has played a very important role in realizing this. In the beginning of 2018 we went to Vienna for several days, with the objective of taking some decisions with regard to our travel project.
"We had three days to reflect upon our travel, making a plan to save money, choosing countries and deciding on a date."
Romain: I will always remember these days because it was the trigger to decide to actually do it. This helped us during one year to stick to our adapted way of life just to be able to turn this travel into reality. Tina: I truly believe that having found each other was decisive in realizing this dream I had had for a long time. I wouldn’t have imagined traveling all alone for such a long period of time, neither with someone else.
"When we decided to travel the world, we stopped being spectator of our life and did everything to be able to leave and live experiences."
“Traveling the world to teach us about ourselves and about what surrounds us.” This summarizes very well our travel philosophy; we simply try to comprehend everything on the most humble way possible. We are young and there are tons of things to learn about life, about people we meet and about ourselves. This travel made us grow and reflect upon how we want to live our lives. We didn’t want that our experiences between our 20’s and 30’s would be summarized by diplomas and professional competencies.
"We wanted life changing experiences that would stay with us forever, imbedded in our personality and approach to life."
Our travel started in Iceland, so this country has an important meaning to us as it’s where we traveled to together for the first time and where Vision Brute started. This trip was totally out of our budget but it was our dream to go; we had to find a solution to be actually able to realize this trip to Iceland as start of our travel around the world. We changed hotels, hostels and restaurants for a 4×4 that served as our home during 10 days: we slept in the back with some blankets and we got a small camping stove to prepare food. The conditions weren’t the most comfortable, but it definitely made the trip much more exciting; we won’t change anything if we would do it again. It’s a place that marked us forever and that brought us a world vision totally different from the one we had before. This provoked curiosity as we saw landscapes of which we didn’t know its existence.
Right now we are in Bolivia, after having visited Colombia, Ecuator and Peru. These countries are so much different from Iceland in terms of culture, landscapes, people and weather, differently impressive. We first continued with photographing landscapes, but soon enough we started to photograph streets, houses and making portraits of people. Each corner has a surprise, another color or another family spending time outside. The cultural richness triggered us to shed light on it and photograph it, capturing ways of living, habits and customs that were all new to us.
"Discovering all these new countries and cultures inspired us to create videos in which we show our experiences while we tell stories about what we had seen, what we learnt about the country or specific places and cultures."
These videos should provoke the ‘wow’ effect within people, have an impact. Watching a travel video is most of the time about the visuals, the incredible landscapes that are being showed. But we believe it’s not only about that. We wanted to focus on what’s beyond the landscapes, what it represents, and that means working with words to be able to tell the story. We had the desire to share our feelings, our emotions and experiences. To talk about the differences between our live in France that we have known since always, and our new live with a backpack and without knowing what the day after would bring. Video helps us discover other forms of creativity such as writing and mounting, which in turn gives us lots of freedom and opportunities to express ourselves both visually and with words. And besides all this, it’s really good to talk about all our experiences:
"It’s an outlet that enables us to express ourselves in a very genuine way, taking a step back from all that happened, what we saw, what we felt… Reflecting upon it and describing it."
"Creating these videos also encourages professional reflection and development."
By doing this we hope to find new ideas and energy. As we went to art school, we have always been interested in video creation but it’s difficult to get into that if you don’t really use it or work with it (Romain is art director in publicity and Tina edits photos for luxury brands). Vision Brute enables us to try different forms of art and that’s also what motivated us in the first place. There are no guidelines, deadlines, specific requirements from school or work that used to kill creativity. Now during our travel we found joy in making videos, using the creativity that was being suppressed.
"Actually, our travel gave us insight in how we feel about our professional careers."
We needed this travel to realize that we don’t really want to return to Paris, that it’s not a lifestyle that fits us and that we are missing something in our current professions. All our experiences in different parts of the world taught us that there are many ways of looking at the concept of career, and we are going to take some time to think about what we are missing in our jobs and in what directions we want to head professionally speaking.
"We think that many others will confirm that travel brings consciousness about several aspects of life."
Our travel made us realize things that changed our way of thinking, our values and our understanding of the world. With every new place or country we are stimulated with new enriching insights. One thing we realized in the very beginning would be the materialistic aspect of life. Before leaving we became aware that the ‘things’ we had accumulated within one and a half year living in Paris, intruded somehow our state of mind. That’s why we wanted to sell most of our stuff before going on our trip. We don’t regret it at all; the act of traveling just with a backpack confirms that we don’t need much and our attitude towards consumption has changed a lot. As well as our attitude towards ecology and mass tourism by the way.
"We try our best to avoid certains places or activities that are likely to damage the ecosystem and we displace ourselves with busses, avoiding as much as possible using a plane."
"Hours and hours on a bus can make you a little moody, as does the intense heat sometimes."
When traveling as a couple and these aspects are also proving your patience, you can imagine that it’s not always easy to spend that much time together. Luckily we identify and understand quite quickly the needs of the other. Key is to let go of these little frustrations quickly; traveling is a unique experience and it would be a pity to have little things bothering you, things that actually don’t matter. It’s essential to respect each other’s space and need, so you can have some time to do your own thing in your own bubble.
"We are managing very well, and at the end what counts is all the amazing experiences and views that we live and share together."
When we finish our travel in South America, ending in Chili, we will head to New Zealand by the end of April. We will be crossing the country with a van, taking a bit more than a month. We are super excited to discover this new way of transport, which apparently is a very different way of traveling. It will be good to have small house on wheels and put aside our backpack for a little while. After New Zealand we will make our way to South Asia.
"We are not sure yet how the itinerary will be, but we surely will be crossing different countries by motorbike, exploring again a new way of traveling!"
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